They sank beneath the waves, the red light from Barnard turning into a purple-green under the ammonia oceans.
"Jill! Get them to stop!" cried Shirley. Her ears caught a strange noise. "Can the hull take the pressure?"
"The pressure hull in Dragonfly is very rugged, since the designers didn't know what it would run into. In compression it should hold against fifty atmospheres. I wouldn't worry too much about them taking us under the water. They must have a good reason for doing so."
"At least the wave action is less under here," said Shirley, gulping down the last remains of the rescued algae-shake.
There were some gasps from Arielle and David.
"It's snowing!" said David.
"Blue fnow!" said Arielle.
George looked out the cockpit window. Shining brightly in the landing lights was a cloud of large blue needles drifting downward with the plane as they sank slowly to the bottom.
"What makes the snow blue?" asked Shirley. "And how come it can snow underwater?"
"The top layers of the ocean here at the inner pole are mostly ammonia from the ammonia rain on the surface," said Jill. "As we get deeper the ammonia concentration decreases but it gets rapidly colder. Right now the ammonia concentration is sixty percent, while the temperature has dropped to minus eighty-five Celsius. That is cold enough to form an ice made of two parts ammonia to one part water. The blue needles must be nucleating out of the supercooled liquid. They are falling because the solid is denser than the liquid."
For a few minutes everyone watched the fascinating scene as the blue snowstorm became thicker and thicker until their landing lights only penetrated a few meters into the swirling cloud.
"Are the flouwen being affected by the cold or the snow?" asked George.
"They are still talking between themselves much as they did at the surface. I don't think they are particularly surprised or affected by the snow or the temperature variation. The temperature has stopped dropping. We're now at minus ninety two Celsius and its starting to go up again. There is also a drastic change in composition. We seem to have entered a warm current headed toward the inner pole. It is denser since it is half-water and half-ammonia."
"What waf that?" said Arielle, her quick eye spotting something unusual in the scene outside the window. "There'f another one!"
"White snow!" said Shirley. "And this time it's going up! It's snowing in both directions! Blue snow falling down and white snow falling up."
"That must be a solid that is half-ammonia and half-water," said Jill. "None of my records indicate its density, but the solid must be lighter than the liquid, like normal ice, so it is rising to the surface."
The blue blizzard started to decrease. First in the size of the needles as they began to dissolve in the water-rich mixture, then finally the individual particles began to disappear and the fall weakened in intensity. But at the same time, the intensity of the upward falling white snow began to increase. The particles were very large, like summer hailstones.
"Listen!" said Shirley, then she got down and put her ear on the deck. The rest of the crew stopped talking and a hush settled over the cockpit. As it became quiet you could hear the pitter-patter of ice-balls striking the bottom of the hull and wings as they rose up past the sinking plane.
They finally passed through the white-ice storm, which tapered off to little white specks that seemed to appear out of nowhere in the frigid water.
"We're moving into the middle of the warm water current," said Jill. "It's now too warm for the ice to form."
"And how warm is that?" asked George.
"Minus seventy-eight centigrade."
"Balmy," said George. The show out the window over, he went back to the galley for a quick bite to eat.
For the next half-hour they continued their downward plunge. There were occasional mysterious creaks and groans as the hull took up the increasing external pressure.
"We've reached the middle of the warm stream," said Jill. "Maximum temperature nearly minus fifty Celsius, warmer than the surface. It's starting to drop again. Water concentration now sixty percent, compared to forty percent ammonia."
"Is it going to continue that trend until the bottom, or are we in for another surprise?" asked George.
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
"It's going to continue the trend, and we are in for another surprise if it does."
"What's the surprise?" asked George. "Anything dangerous?" But before Jill could answer there was a cry from the cockpit.
"MORE fnow!"
George went forward to look. This time the snow took the form of transparent faceted balls. They were tiny at first, but as they fell they turned to marble size. Although transparent, they weren't too hard to see since they glittered rainbow colors in the intense beams of the landing lights as they scattered the light around their internal facets and back out again.
"BEAUTIFUL!" cried Arielle, exhilarated over the colorful scene. "What if it?"
"That's ordinary ice," said Jill. "Pure water crystals settling out of the twenty-five percent ammonia solution to fall to the bottom. The faceted balls must be a compromise between a snowflake and a hailstone."
"I thought ice floated," said Shirley.
"It floats in water, but the ocean is a mixture of water and much lighter ammonia. At concentrations of greater than twenty-three percent ammonia, pure ice is heavier than the ocean."
"Then the bottom must be covered with snow," said Shirley.
"It is," said Jill. "I can see it on my sonar. We're not too far from the bottom. We should start seeing it soon."
Arielle activated the fan motors, and working them in opposite directions she slowly pivoted the plane around in a circle. The faceted ice spheres became nearly invisible and slowed their rate of fall as they entered the water-rich layers of ocean near the bottom. They still refracted the light slightly so it was like looking through a poorly made window pane. The landing lights from the twirling falling plane picked out a white reflection in the distance.
"There'f fomething!" said Arielle. She expertly reversed the fan controls and brought the plane back around so that the searchlights illuminated the pointed white object. As the plane continued down, the point slipped upward into darkness and the light beams illuminated the steep slopes of a white mountain.
"It looks like the alps!" said Katrina. "It's an underwater glacier!"
As they continued their fall, the distant slopes flattened out and began to approach them in the light beams. Arielle turned the landing lights downward and saw the surface below rising rapidly up to meet them.
"Get ready for landing!" she said, and increasing the fan power to provide maximum lift, she attempted to slow their rate of descent. The surface rose beneath them and there was a jar as the nose buried itself in the slushy surface, followed by a thump from the rear as the tail hit. Shirley lost her grip and stumbled backward down the cabin. George grabbed her as she went by. He nearly lost his grip on a hand-hold trying to catch the amazon, but together they got her feet back under her on the slanted deck. They were on the ten degree slope of the glacier, facing up-mountain.
"Is the hull tight?" Shirley asked her imp. She was worried. Even a tiny leak of that poisonous water and they would all have to get into suits until it was fixed and the air cleared.
"The hull is fine," reassured Jill. "I think I can even back off on the internal pressure a little. I'll do it slowly so your ears won't pop."
Shirley gave George a thank-you hug for the rescue and went down to the back to check out the equipment lockers to make sure nothing had been jarred loose by their rough landing. George went forward to the control deck and tapped Katrina on the shoulder, motioning for her to get out of the copilot seat. The aliens had insisted on taking them down here, now it was his job to get them back up and out into space where they belonged.
Katrina babbled on as she unbuckled her seat belt and relinquished the copilot seat to George.
"It's just like the Moteratsch glacier near Pontresina in the Swiss alps! If only I had brought my skis!"
George sat down. He looked over the cockpit display to familiarize himself with Arielle's setup, then spoke in a grumpy voice.
"The only thing I'm sure of is that it's not the alps. Where are we, Jill?"
A map showed up on his display. From the shading and angle, it was obviously a sonar map that Jill had taken on the way down. At the top portion of the screen was a large circular depression. Running out away from the circle were dark ridges of stone, and between the ridges were rivers of ice. A small blinking dot showed their position partway down on one of the glaciers.
"We're on the side of an underwater volcano," said George. "It's a big one, like those on the real Hawaiian islands. If the water weren't so deep here, they would be sticking up in the air for a few kilometers. Fortunately this one doesn't seem to be active since the crater is filled with snow." He looked at Arielle, and raised his right eye, asking for permission to touch the controls. She nodded and he moved the landing lights back and forth, trying to pick up their local terrain.
"I've got the aliens on the infrared scanner," said Katrina from the science scan instrument console. Most of them are still rocked up, holding us down, but two of them seem to be talking together on the left wing."
"Can you understand them, Jill?" asked George.
"I can pick up some of it," said Jill. "Something about getting us out of danger. I still don't understand why they dragged us to the bottom, but I think they think they're doing us a favor."
"Do you get any inkling of what they're going to do next?"
"They are talking about bringing something big, but I don't know what it is."
*It's cold! And boring!* murmured a small soft tab of flesh attached to a large red rock sitting on the wing.
«Then we'll stay here holding Floating¤Rock down while you go break off a big chunk of ice and bring it back.»
*That's hard work!*
§I'll go then. You stay here rocked up.§
~Can I go too!~
«Not this time. Just one can go. The rest must stay rocked up until we get enough ice rocks to replace us.»
*I'll go!* The large red rock rapidly dissolved and expanded into a huge red cloud. It swam rapidly off toward the foot of the glacier, mumbling as it went.
*Cold! Tired! Boring! Rather be surfing!*
Soon it returned pushing a large flat plate of ice. Jill caught a glimpse of it as it settled on the wing.
"They are loading up the wing with blocks of ice," said Jill.
"They really mean to make us stay on the bottom," said George. "Can't you to tell them to stop?"
"They are deliberately ignoring me," said Jill. "We'll just have to wait until they are ready to talk."
"Should I get Arielle to try to shake the ice block off by rocking the fans?" asked George. "It can't be too heavy, despite its size. It is only a little denser than the ocean water and the gravity is low here."
"No," said Jill. "Not yet. They have some good reason for what they are doing. Let's wait and find out what it is."
*That's two. Hard work!*
«Soften up again, Warm§Amber§Resonance, and help Roaring*Hot*Vermillion bring more ice rocks.»
Working together, the yellow and red clouds soon had the top of the wing covered with large chunks of ice and the remainder of the flouwen relaxed their hold on the Magic Dragonfly. They tried to place similar chunks on the tail fins, but the heat exchangers in the tail surfaces melted them off. More blocks were added to the wing and placed on top of the fuselage where the inside heat escaping from the hull soon melted a groove in the underside of the blocks so they balanced on top.
«There! That should make them safe enough.»
§The time is getting close. We should go!§
«First I must tell Floating¤Rock and the Stiff¤Movers about the dangerous time. But there are so many words that it doesn't know. It will take time.»
§Since the Stiff¤Movers can't look, but they can see, perhaps we can tell them faster with a body play rather than words. It would have to be a very simple body play, since they can't look inside the players as we do, but they could get the idea from seeing our outsides.§
«Good idea. You are the best body player. What shall we do?»
§Stiff¤Movers think in terms of colors rather than textures. You be the icy white solid part of our world, and Dainty~Blue~Warble can be the ocean. Roaring*Hot*Vermillion can be Hot. That's an easy part, just sitting there being a red globe.§
*Dumb part!*
«You could make it more realistic by spinning around and having soft bumps on your surface.»
*Warm has bumps?*
«Yes. I have seen them with my looking disk.»
*Like this?* The red cloud turned into a rapidly spinning red sphere with bumps on it. The formless white cloud looked at the result with a few bursts of sharp sound.
«Slower. Make the bumps smaller. Good.»
§Not good. Hot should be spinning over there in front of Floating¤Rock so that the Stiff¤Movers can see. A focused burst of sound rebounded from a point on the glacier some five meters in front of Dragonfly's nose. The spinning red sphere drifted slowly over to the indicated point and hovered a few meters above the snowy surface, the shallow bulges on the spinning surface shining redly in the landing lights.
†Can I be in the body play?†
§Certainly, Bitter†Orange†Chirr. You can be Warm and its pets. Can you do that?§
†Easy. I'm good at body plays.† The large orange blob soon rearranged itself into a large sphere and four smaller spheres. The smaller spheres had nearly invisible threads connecting them to the main body so that they maintained contact with the major portion of the distributed nervous system. The collection of orange spheres started a large slow circular orbit around the red sphere.
§You are too close. We will have to move in that region. Go out a little.§
The orange sphere obeyed, as the stage for the body play was set. Clear«»White«»Whistle went over to Floating¤Rock and started to talk to the strange metal being. A peek through a disk lens confirmed that a number of Stiff¤Movers were seeing their play from the clear places on Floating¤Rock.
«Top of ocean not good,» White Whistler said to Jill, with Jill translating for the benefit of the humans. «Time soon when sky...eat...top of ocean.»
"It wanted to use another word," said Jill. "But we don't have it in our joint vocabulary."
«Good place is hot side of world. Inside islands. We swim there soon. You cannot swim fast. You must stay here. Here is not good, but here is not bad. You not be...eaten. Eaten not right word. We show you. Loud Red is Barnard. O.J. is Gargantua and pets. Yellow Hummer is Sky-Rock, Little Blue is ocean, and I am world," said White Whistler.
"It'f a play!" said Arielle, delighted.
Shirley reached up to the cockpit ceiling and swung down a video camera that peered over George's right shoulder. With the two scanners on the side and the ceiling camera, they would have a complete record of the performance. The snow had let up a little so the visibility was excellent. As White Whistler swam off to join the others, Jill could hear Yellow Hummer giving detailed instructions to Little Blue. As they watched, White Whistler and Yellow Hummer turned into the egg-shaped forms of Eau and Roche. Little Blue flowed around White Whistler, the blue color completely covering the larger white body except for some spots on the outer pole. Twirling smoothly, the miniature version of Rocheworld started its elliptical orbit out near the orange globe of Gargantua and moved closer to the deep red spinning sphere of Barnard.
"It's an amazingly faithful reproduction of the major bodies in their star system," said George. "But I don't see what they're up to. How could orbital dynamics be any danger to us?"
"I don't know," said Jill. "But so far all they are doing is repeating the portion of the orbit that we have already experienced. I suspect whatever is bothering them occurs at or near the periapsis of the orbit, since it is only nine hours away."
"Could it be storms?" asked George.
"I doubt it," said Jill. "The heating from Barnard wouldn't change that much in the last few hours."
"What is it, then?" said George.
Arielle turned and put her finger to her patched lip.
"Huf! I'm watching the play!"
George hushed and watched the play.
*Am I pretty?*
~Wheee! This is fun! Do I get to bloop over now?~
§Not till I tell you.§
«Besides, an ocean isn't supposed to talk. A Hot either, even if it is pretty.»
*Hummm. Twirl.*
§No humming either.§
The blue and yellow eggs spun around each other as they moved between the red globe and the front of Floating¤Rock. The blue ocean began to slosh back and forth.
~Do I go bloop now?~
§Not this turn, but next one. Now!§
~Bloop! This is fun!~
§Now back. That's right. Now bloop again.§
~Bloop!~
§One more time and that's all.§
~Just once more? That was fun bouncing into you.~
§No. World only bloops three times, and we want the play to be a correct one.§
~It's time again. Bloop!~
"My God!" said David. "The whole ocean is transferring from Eau to Roche."
"Not the whole ocean," said George. "But anyone on the surface near the inner pole during periapsis would find themselves under an eighty kilometer high interplanetary waterfall with millions of tons of water falling down on them."
"I don't see how that could be," said Richard. "I remember calculating the relative orbital displacements of Roche and Eau with Thomas when we were arguing whether the Rocheworld orbit was stable or decaying. The most the Barnard tides do to Rocheworld is to move the two lobes some three kilometers closer. That's nothing compared to the eighty kilometer spacing."
Jill had been silent for some time, but now she spoke. "You forget the saddle shape of the gravity potentials at the center point. A change of only three kilometers in separation causes a large shift in the potential surfaces that connect the two lobes. Sea level on Eau is usually forty kilometers below the zero-gravity point, but with the two lobes closer together, the zero-gravity point moves within kilometers of the surface of the water. We also forgot to consider the inertia in the tides. When the two lobes are equally illuminated, the planets are pulled apart by twelve kilometers and the top of the ocean mountain drops fifty kilometers or so, then rushes back in the next three hours as the lobes line up with Barnard and the tides are a maximum. That large water shift is going from a broad source to a narrow region and should build up into a spectacular tidal bore. I can't figure it out because of the conical geometry and the changing gravity field, but it wouldn't surprise me if the bore wave didn't become many kilometers high and travel at tsunami speeds. There would be enough inertia to throw the whole top of the water mountain through the zero gravity region onto Roche."
"How far did the wave go on Roche in the simulation play?" asked George. "It reached the site of Rocheworld Base, didn't it!"
"Yes," said Shirley. "We must warn them!"
"How?" said Jill, ever logical. "My radio, radar, and laser are all worthless this deep under water, and my sonar won't propagate through space to the commsats."
"There's got to be a way," said George. He looked up to see that the alien play had finished. Arielle's hands were giving tiny pitty-pats of applause. White Whistler flowed up and halted in front of the sonar dome.
«Do you understand?»
"Yes," replied Jill. She guessed at the meaning of an alien whistle that she had correlated with the motions of Little Blue. "When Eau and Roche are near Barnard, the ocean will "bloop" over."
«Yes! Bloop can eat...make you a set of number zero.»
"I guess that's the closest they come to a word for death," said George.
«Bloop come soon,» said White Whistler. «We go now. You stay here.»
With that White Whistler streaked off up the glacier at high speed, with the rest of the colorful group following.
"Call them back!" cried George. "We've got to get those ice blocks off and get up to the surface to warn Rocheworld Base!"
"They don't respond," said Jill. "Besides, it would not be safe for you on the surface."
"We've got to do SOMETHING!" George yelled, his command responsibility weighing heavily on his shoulders.
"The best something we can do is wait," said Jill, the calm tone in its voice trying to soothe the emotional human. "You have been up for thirty hours..."
George felt a pair of small warm hands on his neck. They started to massage the tight shoulder muscles.
"Why don't you come back to the galley and let me make you a cup of hot chocolate," said Katrina. "Jill is right, you know."
George gave up and slowly rose from the copilot seat and followed Katrina down the aisle, muttering to himself as he went.
"Not a damn thing we can do except wait..."
For a long time Arielle, Shirley, David, and Richard stared out the cockpit window at the scintillating glitter of the faceted transparent spheres falling down on the white surface. The ammonia-water between the spheres would soon freeze into a slushy ice full of ammonia bubbles that gave the glacier its blue-white color.
"I've been up for nearly twenty hours," said David. "I think I'll go to bed too." He went over and whispered something to Arielle. She shook her curly head violently, brushing him off.
"Not now!" she whispered. "I got much worrying to do."
David turned away and padded heavily down-slope on the carpeted corridor. He paused near the galley. There was a nearly full cup of chocolate sitting there steaming. He doubted that George would be back before it was stone cold, so he lifted the cermasteel cup with its picture of a trainer airplane and downed the warming brew in a single gulp. It ballooned in his esophagus until it was almost painful, then oozed its way down to warm the pit of his stomach. It was a nice antidote for the frozen scene outside and the frozen attitude up front. He put George's cup back down on the counter and confronted the agitated galley imp.
"Fix him another cup," said David, feeling mean. "When... or if... he comes back for it." He went off to a lonely bed, while his place at the galley was taken by Shirley.
Richard got busy at the science console. He had found that the sonar could penetrate the layers of ice beneath them and map the underlying rock strata. It took Jill over one-hundred pulses to build up a high-quality image through the scattering layers of ice. There was nothing else to do, so Jill concentrated on giving the human the best data it could gather.
"Is that a lava flow?" asked Richard, scribing with his finger the telltale outlines of a frozen stream of hardened rock."
"Let me check for continuity," said Jill, bouncing pulse after pulse at the smooth edge, looking for a break that indicated a subsequent event. There was none, the flow was unbroken, and even homogeneous as far as the weak echoes from inside it were concerned. Jill also noticed something else... There was a blurred infrared image on the surface of the glacier above, that matched the extent of the rock flow below.
"The volcano may not be as dormant as we first suspected. There is a weak infrared contour on the surface of the glacier that follows the contour of the frozen rock flow below."
"Let's do a detailed scan of that region," said Richard. "Do you have time for one thousand pulses per scan element?"
"I have nothing else more important to do," said Jill, and started off the first of one billion sonar pulses that it would emit in the next twenty minutes.
Richard waited as the picture slowly built up on his screen. The first scan of the scene was finished in a second. It was seemingly random noise except where a sharp edge gave the human eye an advantage in picking out noise pulses from signal pulses. After a minute the picture was as clear as the one that he had used for his preliminary analysis. The minutes dragged on and the sonar picture slowly became sharper as bits were averaged with bits and the fuzz in the picture faded away. Richard got bored waiting and looked up from the science console at Arielle, sitting patiently in the pilot seat of the stationary airplane, vigilantly waiting for the time when she would again be given the task she was designed for. Richard allowed his glance to wander over the high forehead, the youthful mop of golden-brown hair, and the full lip with the hint of proud flesh. Through the slightly parted lips came a charming sparkle of multicolored light.
"It would be fun to see her laugh in a dark bunk," said Richard, seemingly unconscious of the red, green, gold, and blue sparkles that emanated from the imp on his shoulder, the imp that had lighted his way to bed every night for the past forty-five years. The elven silhouette framed in the landing-light glare of the cockpit window suddenly swiveled. The perky nose lifted into the outline of a scrunched caterpillar. Richard smelled something too, and exploded from his seat.
FIRE! his nose announced.
Richard's gaze swept over Shirley, who was sitting quietly in the galley—there was nothing wrong there. His glance swept back to Arielle who was now sniffing under the edge of the control panel.
That probability covered, Richard started down the corridor with his head jerking back and forth, trying to uncover the source of the smell. As he converted from a panicked animal to a calculating machine, his brain had time to process all the photons that had entered his iris in the last few seconds. There was a soft patch of strange yellow-white light reflecting off the metal trim of the galley. It didn't take trigonometry and spectroscopy for Richard's brain to pinpoint the source as a candle sitting directly in front of Shirley.
Richard froze in the soft glare of that ancient light. It took no longer for Arielle to evaluate the situation, and she turned to resume her responsibility over her stationary command that was slowly freezing solid into a glacier.
Richard made his way back to the galley. Shirley was staring at the flickering light, her eyes full of tears and a fork full of Chicken Little half-way to her mouth. Richard approached and she put down the fork.
"A candle!?!" said Richard, not quite sure whether to chastise or question, then he noticed the candle-holder. It was an imp, glittering with tiny specks of laser light.
"It's all right," said Jill through his imp. "It's a special occasion."
Shirley slowly looked up at Richard, her eyes welling with tears. "It's my birthday candle," she said. "I light it every five years."
"Your birthday!" said Richard. "That's cause for a celebration, not crying!"
"Not if it's your seventy-fifth birthday," said Shirley, and burst into tears.
"Shirley! You silly goose. Birthdays don't mean anything anymore. Why you don't look a day over thirty-five."
"I don't?" she said, sniffing back a tear. "But according to the adjusted calendar for the time I spent on No-Die, I'm at least forty-five years old."
"Nah!" he said. "You're in too good a shape for forty-five."
"Really?" she said.
"Really," he said, sitting down on the stool next to her to gaze into her deep-blue eyes. The candle imp extinguished the flame and skittered off to put the white wax candle back into the protective box in Shirley's personal locker, leaving the two holding hands in the darkness of the corridor, lit only by the faint beams of light streaming back from the snow-covered slopes spreading upwards in the beams from the landing lights. Silhouetted in the scattered light was a lonely pilot, watching intently out the windows, alert for any sign of danger.
"Thomas, come here for a minute and watch." Red Vengeance glanced down at her radar display, then out at the distant globe of Eau hanging in the sky.
"Eau is getting pretty active," she said. Thomas squinted a bit at the large red globe hanging over the dark mountain of water in the sky, then framed the scene between his two hands.
"It's a great shot!" he said. "I think I'll go get my long distance lens." With a bound he was across the bridge and swung down the passway to the crew quarters. He was back in less than a minute.
Red heard an electronic whistle as the liquid crystal shutter activated and then a chitter as the microprocessor loaded the bits into a mass memory. It cost Electropix an extra few dollars to bridge a piezoelectric disk across the data bus so the customer would know that the picture was taken and stored, but it was those little touches that kept Electropix at the top of the heap.
There was another chitter from the camera, then Thomas, still peering through the lens, made a questioning sound.
"What is it?" asked Red. She looked up at Eau, then saw for herself. Rising from the top of the water mountain was a huge fountain of water. Slowly it rose and rose and continued to rise, glowing redly in the sunrise light of Barnard.
"Wow!" said Thomas, then all Red heard was the whistle-chitter, whistle-chitter of the Electropix, cramming bits into its nearly inexhaustible memory.
"It looks like a volcanic eruption on Io," said Red. "It must be because of the tides from Barnard."
"You didn't see it up close like I did," said Thomas. "It didn't rise up from inside like a hot bubble, it just drew back and jumped! Too bad it was dark on Eau when it started, I would have liked to see what caused it."
"That fountain must be ten kilometers high," said Red.
"It's twelve and a half kilometers," said Jack. "That was it's maximum. It is starting to fall now."
"But it's getting so big!" said Red.
"Yeah!" said Thomas, his camera whistling into action again as the fountain spray spread out into a huge white oval.
"And it moves so slowly," said Red.
"That's 'cause it's so big," said Thomas, finally putting aside his camera. The oval was getting splotchy and completely inadequate for artistic photography, and besides he was sure Jack was taking very good scientific pictures of the eruption.
It's developing a mustache," he said.
"Whorls of some kind," said Red. "They're going north and south, then disappearing into the shadow.
"Wait forty-five minutes," said Thomas. "Then Barnard will be shining straight down between the inner poles. Wow! Look at those clouds spread out!"
"Those winds must be something ferocious near the inner point of Roche," said Red. "Perhaps that's what causes the linear rift valleys leading away from the point."
"Either that, or it's stretch marks from the tides," said Thomas. "Look, the mustache ends are starting to curl."
"It looks like the top of a tornado," said Red.
"A tornado two hundred kilometers high and still rising!" said Thomas, reaching again for his Electropix. "Is it moving?"
"No," said Red. "It's base seems to be fixed to the high density region between the inner poles. Thomas...?"
"Yeah, Red? (whistle-chitter, whistle-chitter) Something bothering you? (whistle-chitter)"
"We can't run the ascent module in that weather. Tell Dragonfly to wait until after periapsis."
"What's the matter, Red? You chicken?" said Thomas, instantly regretting the flip comment.
There was a dead silence for a minute.
"This chicken didn't live to be thirty-eight in the asteroid belt by jetting off on stupid missions!" said Red furiously. "Have Jack check the numbers if you want. With those winds, the ascent module has negative margin. Goodnight, Thomas."
A green streak with a red head launched itself angrily across the bridge and down the passway, leaving behind a trail of slowly falling drops of water that settled slowly to the cling-carpeted floor.
Thomas was left alone on the bridge. A short conversation with Jack confirmed that Red's intuition was correct. Conditions had changed enough that the crew on Dragonfly could not be rescued. The ascent module was designed for fighting gravity, not an Oz-sized tornado.
Thomas called up Carmen from the galley below.
"I think you'd better raise Dragonfly through the commsats," he said. "There's a change in plans." To comfort his personal agony over his mishandling of Red during a crucial situation, he nervously unholstered his camera and started taking more pictures. Later he would admit they were the worst he had ever taken.
Carmen finally broke through the preoccupation and the whistle-chitter. "None of the commsats have had any contact with Dragonfly in over three hours."
Thomas suddenly felt old.
Shirley, whose sleep was as light as that of a nervous young mother with a newborn, opened her eyes in the darkness of her bunk, the blackness softened by the tiny flicker of lights from the imp in her hair. Something had changed on Dragonfly and her alarm system had wakened her. She lay there listening to the subtle throbbings of a ship at work keeping six humans safe while submerged deep under a poisonous sea. There was nothing really wrong or Jill would have awakened her, but something had changed. She listened more intently, then she suddenly realized what it was that was bothering her. She couldn't hear! She swallowed violently and her ears cleared.
"We've changed pressure, Jill. What's going on?"
"The tides are getting stronger," said Jill through her imp. "The water level above us has dropped over ten kilometers in the last hour, so I changed the internal pressure accordingly. There is no danger, go back to sleep."
"Are you sure that the decrease in pressure won't trigger anything, like a phase change in the ice that will cause the glacier to fissure and swallow us up?"
Jill paused a second as she ran the various possibilities through a detailed analysis.
"Positive," said Jill. "Go back to sleep."
As Shirley closed her eyes and started the ten second process of putting her brain back on idle, the tide above them reached its minimum. Deep within the bowls of the planet, a chamber of magma that had been kept bottled up by the overburden of water was finally able to push its way up to the surface, rumbling as it came.
"Earthquake!!!" shouted Shirley, who was out in the aisle and halfway to the engineering console before she woke up. Another rumble threw her against the galley. Holding on to whatever she could grab, and wishing that her bare feet had corridor boots on, she made her way forward through the rocking ship and strapped herself into the chair in front of the engineering console and started to take Jill through a checkout.
"What'f going on?" said a sleepy Arielle, who had tumbled out of her bed in her bunny suit and was now trying to keep upright by holding onto one of the stools in the galley. "If it an earthquake?"
"I don't think so," said George from up front. "It's been going on too long, and is getting stronger. I'm afraid that this volcano we're sitting on is about to erupt. I don't know what we can do about it, but you'd better get up here."
Arielle let go of the stool and started forward, but was thrown back into Richard's arms. The nearly naked young man, dressed only in shorts but wearing corridor boots to hide his disfigured feet, took the bunny-suited pilot under one arm. Carrying her forward, he installed her in her seat in the cockpit. Once there, the alert pilot brain checked over her console and turned to George.
"I try to get free," she said. "If I make fan go with earthquake, maybe I get ice off."
"It's worth a try," said George. "Go to it!" His eye caught something high above them in the unlit darkness at the peak of the mountain.
"Mygod!!!" he cried, his voice choked with fear. He pointed.
"It's red hot lava!" shouted Shirley. "It's coming down the mountain right at us!"
"It's got to eat through a lot of glacier before it gets to us," said Richard. "Get us out of here, Arielle!"
Arielle, like every test pilot living, became even calmer and more deliberate in her motions as the danger grew.
"I think I'll try a yaw twift," she said, operating the fan levers in synchronism with the shaking of the ice beneath them. She kept it up for ten seconds, then stopped.
"Nope," she said. There was a second's pause in her motions while her brain moved at high speed through her other options.
"Now I try fome pitch," she said, and tried raising and lowering the nose of the plane with the fans in an attempt to buck the ice off. After another ten seconds she stopped.
"Nope."
A hushed silence fell over the crew, and David took advantage of a lull in the shaking to rush from his bunk to his computer console seat. Everyone was looking at Arielle.
"I've got the lava flow on the science scanner cameras," said Katrina. "It's moving at a kilometer per minute through the glacier. Through the infrared imager you can see a wall of melted water flowing down just ahead of it and getting bigger as it comes."
George switched his console to the infrared scanner display. A white-hot tongue of fire flowed down from the top of the mountain to the middle of the screen where it met the cool-blue ice of the glacier. At the intersection was a roiling mound of yellow with large blue chunks floating on the surface.
"What are those blue chunks?" he asked.
"They look like blocks of ice," said Katrina. "Yes, they must be. The glacier is pure water ice, which sinks in Eau's ocean because it is heavier than the ammonia solution. The mound of yellow is ice melted by the lava and is nearly pure water. The glacier ice will float on water, so it is breaking up into blocks and rising to the surface of the water mound as the lava burrows under the glacier and weakens its hold on the rock."
"Those blocks are as big as office buildings! Get us out of here, Arielle!"
"Let me fee now," said Arielle calmly. "Maybe a yaw twift with a pitch maneuver..." Tiny hands rapidly flickered over the controls and Dragonfly bucked and pitched in an attempt to get free.
George stared at the infrared scanner image showing the yellow wall of warm water pouring down the slope at them at high speed. They only had a few seconds before it would be on them.
"Nope," said Arielle calmly. "Hummm... Maybe..." and the plane lunged backward and stuck.
George looked up from the screen and gazed out the cockpit window. He turned the landing lights upward. He couldn't see the invisible wall of water sweeping down on them, but he could see, floating hundreds of meters above the surface of the glacier in seeming defiance of gravity, blocks of white ice tens and hundreds of meters in size, tumbling through the turbulent water.
"Nope," said Arielle. "Maybe..."
"Brace yourselves," commanded George.
The Magic Dragonfly surged upward as the tongue of warm heavy water swept under its wings and lifted it up.
"The ice blocks are floating off the wings!!!" shouted Shirley.
George noticed that he was no longer in control of the landing lights. He glanced quickly at Arielle and saw flickering eyes on a serious face alternating glances between console display and cockpit window. He turned his glance back out the window. They were rising rapidly up the steep slope of the flowing water. Ahead of them was a tumbling block of jagged ice over thirty meters in diameter.
"Twelve o'clock high!" he said.
"Got it," said Arielle. The nose dipped and Dragonfly dove deep into the water. George watched the undersurface of the iceberg pass overhead, not ten meters away. Now that they were deep in the water, they were relatively safe from the ice chunks floating above, but they were being carried down slope by the turbulent water. Dragonfly creaked as its wings were stressed near their limits.
"Can't ftay here," said Arielle. "Up we go. Help me find gap." She turned the giant plane on its tail and applied full thrust with the fans to accelerate the rise of the buoyant airplane in the dense water. George peered out, trying to see beyond the reach of the landing lights. There was a large white shadow far above them, then another.
"Bogie at twelve o'clock, another at two o'clock low... a little one at eleven..."
Arielle went into a spiral, then stopped with the wings aligned with the flow of the water. The shaking and creaking abated a little as they drew closer to the ice cluttered surface.
"Big one at twelve o'clock low," warned George.
"Fee anything on the high fide?" she asked, adding her eyes to his.
"Nope," he said.
"Then we go that way," said Arielle pulling them upside down for a moment then resuming the upward climb. George watched the iceberg pass beneath their nose as the plane broke through the surface of the dense water. The plane hesitated as it entered the lighter ocean water and lost much of its buoyancy, then continued its climb on the fans. Arielle set the controls for a steady climb, then changed her display to the sonar.
"How far to the top?" she asked.
"Twelve kilometers," said Jill. "At our present rate of ascent we should reach the surface in two hours, but the tide is coming back in and the surface level is increasing, so it will take longer than that."
There was a rumble through the water. Arielle tilted the plane back and they peered upside down at the volcano below them. A bright spot of yellow-white welled up from the crater and poured down the slopes in all directions, covering over the dull-red cooling flows that had preceded it.
"I'm really surprised that the flouwen put us there," said George. "They nearly killed us."
"Don't forget," reminded David. "They normally have better sense than to be in this part of the globe during periapsis. By the time they get back, the lava would have cooled off and been covered again by snow."
There was a rattle on the hull as they ran into a snow flurry of faceted hailstones. Arielle tilted the plane back and they continued their climb. With the plane on autopilot, Arielle finally noticed the pink elastic cuffs on her wrists and looked down to see she was still in her bunny suit.
"I think I'll go get dreffed," she said to George, blushing slightly. She unbuckled her seat belt and fluttered lightly down to the rear of the airplane. Richard climbed up to take her seat so he could look out of the window of the cockpit.
"That was close," he said.
"You just witnessed the most spectacular feat of underwater flying you'll ever see," said George.
And with mismatched fans, too," added Richard. "That girl is some pilot!"
"Yeah," agreed George. "Pretty too."
"Yeah!" agreed Richard.
"Men!" muttered Shirley.
"Ya!" agreed Katrina, as she kept the science scanners busy during their slow ascent.
After about half an hour Arielle climbed up to join them again. The neuskin bandage was off her lip and some carefully applied makeup made the fine line of scarless new skin almost invisible. She paused when she reached the cockpit, stuck her head up between the two men and smiled. The mini-imp was still holding her tooth in place and lights flashed between red lips.
"I have my seat back now?" she asked.
"Sure," said Richard. He unbuckled and climbed down, using various nooks in the scanner instrument racks as hand and foot holds. He paused to boost Arielle up to her seat, then stepped down to stand on the strut holding Shirley's console chair to the deck. She swiveled and looked up at him, her calves brushing against his.
"I'm making lunch down below," he said. "Any preferences?"
"Soup would taste good," she said.
"No soup," he said. "I just washed my hair and with our attitude the way it is you'd be sure to spill some down on me. Finger foods only."
"Protocheese and an algae shake in a squeezer, then," she said.
Richard picked up some other orders in his climb down, and soon lunch was being passed up by a busy Christmas Branch as Dragonfly continued its vertical climb. Lunch break entertainment included a replay of the two-way snow show.
Through bites of a pseudosausage, George discussed the sonar display with Jill.
"What are those bars that move across the screen?" he asked.
"Those are wind waves," said Jill. "Although we have passed high tide and the ocean is falling again, the sun has heated up Eau's atmosphere and the winds are now blowing up the mountain again. We're now so close to Barnard we get a lot of heating and the winds are quite strong and make large waves.
"How large?" said George, not really sure he wanted to know.
"They are one hundred meters high, have a wavelength of fifty kilometers and are moving at two hundred kilometers an hour."
"That sounds dangerous," said Arielle in a worried tone. "Shall I slow ascent until waves die down?"
"Are the tops breaking?" George asked Jill.
"The sonar gives no indication of it," replied Jill. "Although I am sure they will as they approach the inner pole and grow larger."
"No, Arielle, keep her on the same heading," said George. "We've got to get to the surface and warn the crew in Rocheworld Base about the danger. Besides, I've got an idea for putting those waves to a good use."